While the men remained at the bar, the women huddled in the dining room. Mariela, pale and queasy with what she thought was seasickness, sighed and the Englishwoman, beside her on a couch, held her, dabbing a handkerchief on Mariela’s sweaty brow. The Englishwoman could not speak Spanish, but she would ask Mariela, “Are you all right?” And the kindness in the woman’s eyes compelled Mariela Montez, despite her pain, to nod.
The sky was very dark, as all life might end, but after much listing, the ship had regained its bearings. All the same, a new crisis unfolded: two sailors carried a third, dripping with water and blood, into the dining room from the deck and laid him out on a table. He was a stocky middle-aged man with a hooked nose and he was gasping with pain. A few minutes before, a powerful gust had caught him on deck and sent him flying back into an anchor cable, snapping his spine. Shortly, the ship’s doctor arrived to examine him and administer injections. And it was then, just as they were carrying the poor man on a stretcher to the infirmary, that Mariela began to feel she would burst and went into labor.
Soon enough Mariela, contorted and crying (and for the next ten hours pushing, weeping, sweating, and sighing), found herself in an infirmary bed awaiting a new life, while the sailor, resting on another bed not a yard away from her, awaited death. She would remember seeing the kindly Englishwoman and the doctor standing over her, and remember that her husband, Nelson O’Brien, passed the night traipsing between the upper and lower decks and that every fifteen minutes or so he would peer into the room and ask the doctor, “How is my wife?” And that he, who was sometimes a squeamish fellow, would take hold of her right hand and say in Spanish, his breath tinged with whiskey, “I’m here.”
Years later she would weep, thinking of that time—for some of the ink of her notebooks seemed washed with tears—and she’d write that at two in the morning the hum of the winds died down and that, during the tedium of her labor, she would try to reach over and touch the injured sailor’s hand, which dangled off his bed. For much of the night he was unconscious, but sometimes he’d cry out in pain, his head, pock-skinned and ruddy, as round as the moon (and “tormented as a lonely star”). Sometimes he tried to speak to her or the doctor, but what he said she did not know.
Recalling the moment he died, with a gasp—a bubble seeping with saliva and blood on his lips—Mariela had written, “I would have done anything to save him.”
But life went on its way. Not an hour after the doctor had covered the man with a sheet, a torment came over her. In those moments while she was sighing, heaving, vomiting as if something had to get out, a fierce and powerful being with a claim on life—a daughter, Margarita—came into the world—Margarita Montez O’Brien, who, with trembling hands, would inherit everything around her and become the oldest of fourteen sisters and a son.
***
In some other place, an elderly Irish gentleman stands before an old camera with a folding bellows-type canopy, and he tries, for the life of him, to focus exactly on his subject, extending and retracting the lens, and he becomes quite happy when, looking out over a field, he manages to focus on a springtime rose.
The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Page 53